Many brick and mortar retailers will have one primary location and one or more secondary location(s) where they position the same type of product for purchase by customers. Multiple product locations are leveraged not only for shopping convenience, but also to increase potential sales. One of the classic examples of type of product that has multiple locations within a store (a “multiple-locational product”) is batteries, which can be found in several areas of a store. For example, a primary location for batteries is usually in or near the electronics department of many stores. While, at the same time, batteries will be positioned at a number of secondary locations throughout the store, such as at the end of toy aisles in which toys that require batteries are located, and near the costumer checkout point of sale (POS) registers.
In many store systems, store inventory or perpetual inventory, is maintained at the SKU (stock-keeping unit) level maintaining a total count of inventory within the store. As product is received, this inventory is increased and as it is sold it is then decreased. To improve productivity of store associates as well as to provide a foundation for store pick and ship operations, a more accurate method of maintaining store inventory is desirable in which inventory is maintained at the location level itself.
The difficulty in maintaining inventory at the location level is that it is not the associates that work in the store that pull inventory from the shelf, but rather it is the customer. In a traditional retail operation, the shopping experience is manual and it is not until the customer goes through the checkout process that the inventory management systems within the store know (i.e. obtain data sufficient to determine) that inventory should be decremented.
Even with a mobile shopping cart, most of these systems only require the customer to scan the product and not the location. Therefore, while conventional systems know that inventory needs to be decremented at the SKU level, the inventory management system does not know which location needs to be decremented.